I believe every young woman (and man) should be given a good knife and a cutting board at a young(ish) age.  The more I listen to folks spout about diet, the more I think that it can be solved with just those two items. Every meal should require chopping of some sort.

For the past couple of weeks I have had a kitchen, this is unusual for me, most of the year I cook on a Camp Chef.  I love my Camp Chef, but it limits the way I cook, or I thought it did.  I am so out of practice using an oven, I still cook every meal on my stove top.  That’s not a bad thing though. 

We practice clean eating, my definition is fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh meats, limited processed foods.  It has the advantages of limiting our sodium, carbohydrate and chemical intake.  If I can buy organic and non GMO, I will, but let’s face it, that is entirely dependent on where you get to buy your food.

Every trip to the grocery store is a practice of this mentality.  We start in produce and gather up fresh fruits and vegetables and then we continue along the outside ring of the store.  The outside is where they keep dairy, meats, and produce.  We only dip down an aisle for a specific item.  Yesterday it was a jar of prepared spaghetti sauce and a box of cereal. 

Each meal starts with my knife and cutting board and a trip to the refrigerator, I may not want a salad, but somehow we are getting veggies in our meal.  For breakfast I slice tomatoes, mushrooms and green onions almost daily to add to our eggs.  For dinner, I get out those same veggies plus some cabbage, lettuce, cauliflower, asparagus…just about anything left over and if I can’t add them to the main dish, they go in a salad bowl.  The most fun I have though is figuring out how to add it to the main dish.  Are you having spaghetti?  Sure the prepared sauce is good, but what if you sliced an onion and chopped some garlic to saute in olive oil first, then add the meat, then add the sauce.  Are you done?  Not yet, chop some mushrooms, roma tomatoes and asparagus to finish out your sauce.  See what you just did?  You added all your veggies and no one is going to recognize them, they just know your sauce tastes amazing.

Now you would think this would lead to a lifetime of thinness, but alas, it does not.  What it does lead to is a healthy body that can do anything.  Practice shopping the outside ring, and get out your trusty knife and cutting board and learn to use them.  You will feel better almost immediately, and I have a theory that if you are feeding kids, you will notice a change in them too.